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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

It's really nothing to do with "controlling the behavior of others".

What I'm seeing on Mastodon is a desire by quite a few people to use these open, public messaging systems as something more akin to private mailing lists. They have no desire for anyone-can-read/anyone-can-reply, they just want a nice little circle of people who all agree to be a part of the circle and to have the others there too.

I believe that many of the people who want this are too young to have ever been on old listserv-style mailing lists, and for them, this sort of messaging technology is obviously how you would do this sort of thing.

I don't think they are right, but I also see how they would think this, and they're not clearly wrong.

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Twitterlikes seem to straddle the space between a public forum, with open discussion on particular topics, and a private blog, where the author moderates the comment section on their posts.

That's a take, but I think its quite generational (I could be wrong).

Twitterlikes to me seem utterly public, and I get really confused when I encounter people who think they are having a private group chat.

But as I said, I do understand how and why these different views of the same technology could arise.

That's correct, but what are the alternatives? Most people aren't going to do it via email, so Listserv won't work. And they want convenient features like links and images.

I'm not a social media guy so I truly don't know if alternatives exist. Google Plus is the only service I know that seriously tried to solve the problem. At the moment Mastodon seems like the simplest approach. If they could define "circles" (that applies across servers), then it would be ideal.

I'm on server A and you are on server B. I define a circle (and own it), and I add you to it. The system ensures that only people within the circle can see the posts, and you cannot reshare outside the circle. If someone in the circle is misbehaving, I can kick them out. Perhaps add some moderation capability (within the circle).

You can argue that this is just a "Mastodon network within a Mastodon network", and you'd be correct. It still acts mostly like a "private" list.

Lots of other subtleties to figure out, but this alone would be a great start!

That's a way of adapting the fundamentally public design of the Twitterlikes to be like a listserv.

I'm not convinced that this is where we should be starting if creating a 21st century listserv-alike is the goal. You're taking a technology that was fundamentally conceived of in a "push-to-public" mindset and trying to fit it into a "push-to-the-group" mindset.

> You're taking a technology that was fundamentally conceived of in a "push-to-public" mindset and trying to fit it into a "push-to-the-group" mindset.

The benefit is you get to create one account that you can use in many groups/circles, while still posting things to the public and interacting with random users who are not in any of your groups.

It's like an inverted WhatsApp - the difference being that Whatsapp is private by default, and doesn't allow you to post to the "public". It also lacks features (e.g. threading).

> The benefit is you get to create one account that you can use in many groups/circles

Like an email address!

More seriously, fair point about the comparison to Whatsapp. But that gets at why I think this is the wrong direction to start from.

My gut instinct is that if you want what I think people want, then neither Twitterlikes nor Whatsapp/Telegramlikes are where to start (they do, however, serve as a series of lessons in UX and much more).

> Like an email address!

Except I cannot send an email to the whole world, as I angrily learned after switching to email from BBS's ;-)

Also, there is a reason every explanation of Mastodon says something to the effect of "your handle is like an email address - it's tied to a provider" :-)

But email addresses are not inextricably tied to a provider at all.

Mine - paul@linuxaudiosystems.com or paul@ardour.org - have no relationship to whoever handles my email.

The fact that everybody got conned/tricked/was too lazy to NOT use @gmail.com doesn't really change that fact.

By contrast, Mastodon handles are truly tied to a server.

As for sending email to the whole world, let me know how to toot to the whole world, I'd like know :)

> But email addresses are not inextricably tied to a provider at all.

Details, details. They are for 99% of people on the planet :-)

> As for sending email to the whole world, let me know how to toot to the whole world, I'd like know.

You send a toot, and anyone in the world can see it. Sure, it doesn't show up in their inbox, but email doesn't have an equivalent.

If a toot lands in a forest, and nobody hears it, did it actually land? :)

Now that Twitter doesn't let anyone see anything without being logged in, the concept of a "anyone can read, a permissioned few can interact" is growing on me. I still find useful information from listservs archived on Google groups, if we can keep something like that going for the next century we'll be better off than the timeline where everything happens in a discord or slack, and when it's gone it's gone.

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